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This is the second of our two-part interview (part one ran yesterday) with Conjurer and Investigator (his words) James Randi, whose organization, the James Randi Education Foundation, has a long-standing offer: prove you have paranormal abilities and they'll give you $1 Million. They say they've recently made this award easier than ever to win. Note that, lower bar or no, Randi claims the last time a conjurer's illusion fooled him was many years ago, when he was very young. It was one done by the famous Chan Canasta -- and Randi claims that in the end he figured it out, anyway. So forget the $1 Million, relax, and enjoy James Randi. He's a great raconteur, so we can all be jealous of interviewer Rob Rozeboom (samzenpus) for having made this great video even as we enjoy watching it.

Rob
Rozeboom: So of
all the people you have investigated over the years, do you have a
favorite, do you have one that you thought, wow that was very clever?

Randi:
No unfortunately I have always sort of hankered have some “psychic”
and I use that word in quotation marks, come down the road, that
something that would really ____12:55
where I’d say, hey that is something else. I’ve been
around for all these years. Let’s face it. I know how these
things are done. And to any experienced conjuror, a term I prefer
rather than magician, to any experienced conjuror with a certain
amount of maturity in the field, it is so immediately evident what is
happening. And any magicians that includes myself, of course, walking
along the street, and coming upon a street performer doing card
tricks or doing whatever sort of tricks he or she is doing, well we
literally do, you saw it in The Sting, did you see that motion
picture?

Rozeboom
Yeah.

Randi:
Okay, well you know the motion which is like this, and if you catch
the magician’s eye, and you simply do that, and the magician
acknowledges your gesture and he or she knows that you are going to
keep quiet and just watch the performance, not disturb it, and if
required to name a playing card or a number, you would be most
cooperative in that respect. Because it is entertainment. These
people are not taking your money under false pretences.

Rozeboom
Right. If you’ve ever had one that took you a while to figure
out what was happening, any close calls?

Randi:
No, not now. No. In the early days, Chan Canasta. When I was I
guess 14 years of age or so, Chan Canasta took me for a ride for one
day. I had to go back and see the show the second time until it
dawned on me what he was doing. But, no, it might be with some of
the professionals some of my close friends, who are really very
experienced magicians, they sometimes will go through all kinds of
shenanigans to fool me and they will set me up in some way or
another, and they will try; as a matter of fact, Richard Feynman, do
you know that name at all?

Rozeboom
No.

Randi:
He is a physicist, a Nobel Prize winner of course in physics, and he
lives in California. Dick and I were great friends. And we had a bit
of an arrangement after he contacted me and we met and found we were
on the same wavelength. Dick Feynman and I had this arrangement,
that I would spring a surprise on him in such a way that he would
probably be astonished by something that I had just done
unexpectedly. And then he had to ask me the question was that one of
them? If I said yes, that meant that he had the privilege of asking
me any question he wanted as to the modus operandi that I might have
employed as long as the answer was yes, no, or doesn’t apply,
and so I wouldn’t answer but then get the fact, but he would
say something like if we had not been in this room with the ceiling
and side chair, would that still have worked? And if I’d said
no, then he’d say aha and he’d give me some
possibilities. But he did all the thinking.

He
never failed. This was no dummy. I actually had some pretty smart
friends over the years I must say. Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, just
a few name droppers that I can throw at you. But Feynman was
something else. He always solved it. Sometimes it took him several
days. One interesting, what few may find interesting, I hope you do.
The little episode occurred one day when I had done a stunt with him
with a spoon that he had at the side of his coffee up just given to
him by the restaurant. I said, okay, took it and manipulated it
slightly and it melted away and broke. He said was that one of them.
I said yes. He started to ask his questions. And that was in
California. And I was living in New Jersey at that time.

So
I actually went back to New Jersey, and he would call me occasionally
and ask me one of the questions that he asked for a yes, no, or
doesn’t apply. One day, at 2 o’clock in the morning I got
a call: He says Hi Dick Feynman, and said if the waiter had come in.
I say Dick, Dick, Dick it is 2 o’clock in the morning. And he
paused for a second, he said I know, oh you are in New Jersey. I
said yes, you see the earth rotates as seen from the North Pole in a
counter clockwise direction in a period of once every 24 hours. This
is time zones. He said yeah I know that. But obviously you don’t
know that because it is 2 o’clock in the morning. Will you
just answer the question yes or no. And I said yes. He said fine, I
will call you back quick. And I sat there for the rest of the night
of course waiting for him to call me back at any moment but he’d
probably forgotten about that. He didn’t connect with the real
world, in many cases but when it came to physics, oh yes. And Dick
eventually solved that one too.

Rozeboom
So this isn’t really related to that, but I read that you were
on tour with Alice Cooper.

Randi:
Who?

Rozeboom
Alice Cooper.

Randi:
Vincent Furnier. He used to use that nameOh yes, I just saw
Coop not too long ago, where was it? Was it in California? Or was
it at Atlanta I believe? That was for Dragon Con. I guess that was
Atlanta. I am not sure. We had a little conference, it is on YouTube
some place I believe, as a matter of fact. When we walked away from
that conference, he and me and his wife, we walked down the ramp, we
went back stage and I said Coop we could’ve told them about so
and so, and he said oh yeah, and what about the such and such; we
thought of all the things that we could have talked about in front of
the cameras. So we will do another one. Maybe at another Dragon Con
one of these days. But Coop and I are good friends. He is a Born
Again character, and his father used to be I guess still is, I don’t
know if his father is still with him, but he was a Mormon minister.
So he was raised in a religious family, but he has now turned into a
Born Again, and he has appeared on many other smaller rock channels
giving his message. We don’t argue about that. Coop would
never argue with me. He’d know that we’d be fist
fighting in no time at all. But we got along famously well. We had
a good time on the Billion Dollar Babies Tour. I toured with him for
90 days. And he made a whole load of money and he paid me very
handsomely too, thank you.

Rozeboom
Excellent. I also saw that how do you feel about
I’ve seen people accuse you of actually being a fraudster, not
the kind of fraudster that you are proud of, but actually having
psychic abilities and that is how you actually do some of these
things. What do you say to that?

Randi:
It is a little sad, because what they are doing is they are saying I
am so smart I can figure it out, how the mentalists, that is not
mentalism, that is the real thing, that James Randi, I am smart
enough to know, no they are not. They can be fooled as well as
anybody else. They don’t special training or instruction in
this field. And that is the purpose of the James Randi Educational
Foundation. Not to reveal magic tricks, because the magicians are
legitimate entertainers. They work hard at it. And we are honest
about it. We say I am going to fool you, here you go, and we fool
them. So we are very honest about it, we don’t tell them we
have any ethics at all, we don’t tell them that we really do
have magical powers.

Rozeboom
Good. Do you miss it sometimes? What did you like better,
performing or doing this?

Randi:
Oh no, no. What I am doing now is what I guess I was training all
those years to be able to do. As I say I am 84, going on 100,
because I am an optimist you see; and I have got a few years left I
am sure. I want to continue on doing this. And I want to go when I
go not yet, not yet, okay, I want to make sure that I have done as
much as I possibly can I want to go in the saddle so to speak. I
want to go hot on the trail of some scallywag who needs a
comeuppance. I want to be working at the moment I go. Cut.

Rozeboom
Well interviews work kind of so here we go, dream come true. How
many people do you have working on debunking these things?

Randi:
Well it is not a case of a number of people debunking. My whole
organization is well we have our headquarters in Los Angeles.
DJ Grothe is our president, as I am sure you know. And I am really
the founder. I am supposed to sit and look noble and smile at people,
and pose for pictures. We have a larger network of people, literally
all over the world, because the million dollar prize that we offer is
available to anyone in the world. All they have to do is write an
application and they have to explain what they believe they can do
and under what circumstances and with what accuracy. It is a very
simple thing. But most people don’t seem to be able to manage
that. We get many applications that are never followed up on. They
just ask for the form, we send them the form, or they can obtain it
from our site, of course it is very easily available, and they fill
it in there, they have to get it notarized and send it in to prove
their identity. That is all.

And
then we design tests mutually with them, so we don’t exceed
what their claim is for their ability, and we design the tests in
such a way that is amenable to all parties concerned, and if the
opportunity arises, we then conduct a test. Now at the coming Amazing
Meeting in Las Vegas, and you can go to our site, and look up TAM The
Amazing Meeting, TAM 2013, get all the details of it, we have got a
great bevy of speakers this year, as we always do, very satisfactory,
we will be actually testing some people for what’s known as
therapeutic touch. Now the North American Nursing Society, is very
much on this. They believe that their nurses have the power to sense
the human aura and they can balance the human aura and they can
smooth it out, and what not. That my friends, Penn and Teller came
up with a term, oh yes Bullshit, that is the term they came up and I
adopted it very readily. But the North American Nursing Association
though they are supposed to be dedicated to truth and to medical
science and such, they have adopted this, they say their nurses can
do it. Well we have challenged them for years now to do it.

And
we are going to have a very satisfactory, double blind but very, very
simple test as to whether or not they can sense the human aura,
because they all say oh I can tell from my hand, oh you have a very
strong aura, yes sir, okay, we do this with a simple fiber glass
sleeve which is opaque, and we have a person sitting behind the
screen, and either that person puts their arm into the fiber glass
sleeve or doesn’t it depending on the tossing of a coin. It is
very simple. And then we ask the person sitting on the other side of
it, to sense the human aura that their marvelously sensitive
facilities, sure, and if they can do, they can do it to beat the laws
of chance, so you never getting enough and we agree in advance what
that’s going to be of course. We have statisticians who work
on that sort of a problem, and if they can do that, they can win the
million dollars. I always say it is a million dollars, it is held by
an investment company in New York City and we have proof of that.

Well,
that’s an interesting perhaps angle too. We have for a long
time now, we have advertised that all one has to do is come to our
site, which is www.randi.org and
all they have to do, get in there, look up the million dollar
challenge, fill up the form, mail it in, after having it notarized,
get tested they can win the million dollars. But where are the
applicants? These people say they can do it, and they advertise it,
and they make money doing it, by selling their services to other
people. If it is that easy, why don’t they simply do it, and
collect the million dollars? That is the basic question right there.
But you are not required to do it. Some of them are so wealthy like
Sylvia Browne for example she doesn’t need my million dollars,
she has got lots of her own, but there are other people out there who
claim that they have got these abilities let’s find out. I am
amazed at how few applicants we have for this prize money.

Rozeboom
Well, as you say, with Sylvia, John Edward, they are on TV, they
have how many bestsellers, how many people buy their books.

Randi:
John Edward by the way with an ‘S’ on the end of it, it
becomes a politician and you wouldn’t want to buy that one by
John Edward.

Rozeboom
So I read that Penn was working on a movie about your life. Is that
the same as An Honest Liar the Kickstarter.

Randi:
An Honest Liar that Penn is not connected with at all. Penn is
working on a biography of me, but An Honest Liar people, we get along
just fine because I have always told them don’t pull your
punches, any questions, or anything, I have nothing to hide, I am
upfront with it, it is coming along very, very well. I am in
fact, I don’t have my schedule in front of me there but I
believe next week I am going to Tallahassee to work. I travel far and
wide as you can see. But I think this coming week they are coming
here to do some filming, we call it filming still even though it is
video. And they are doing it high definition. Wow! That is pretty
scary stuff you know. The first shot they shot with me, they showed
me some blowups, and you can see every pore.

Rozeboom
It is. The makeup they have to do for high definition is completely
different. It is unusual.

Randi:
Oh yeah, yeah, because pancake makeup just doesn’t work that
well anymore. They may be going back to grease makeup because the
pancake makeup shows us flakes on the face, it is astonishing the
definition.

Rozeboom
Yeah. So besides the challenge what do you do most of the time
nowadays?

Randi:
Well I am writing my tenth book A Magician In The Laboratory and I
have a lady who has volunteered to do the proofing of the manuscript.
That is coming along well. We are more than half way through that.
And it is going to be published first of all on Kindle, that is quite
an attractive situation. You can get published on an electronic
media first so if you have any real howlers, real mistakes, really
dreadful boo boos in your manuscript, people write you right away,
and they correct you on it, a misspelling or a misuse of a term,
whatever, so that kind of a mistake which would go into the printed
job in the form of books permanently is correctable if you don’t
go to print and start to fell trees to make paper for your book for a
few months, then you get a chance to make all those corrections
before the poor trees have to sacrifice their lives and be turned
into wood pulp.

Rozeboom
Right. The internet is great at instant feedback like that.

Randi:
Yes it is. And on programs like this.

Rozeboom
Right. Really that is what I got for you this afternoon. I really
appreciate your time. I’ve been really looking forward to this.
We are all pretty big fans. So thanks a lot for your time, and
thanks for your work and good luck.

Randi:
It is good luck, when you have to hold on.

Rozeboom
Perfect. I got it.

Randi:
It has nothing to do with luck. Well, though it’d be years
falling on me and things like that, yes that is a luck factor we
can’t do much about it, but most of it

Rozeboom
How about may chance be with you? How about that? Is that better?

Randi:
That will be good. Okay. Alright. I’ve got to adopt that, I
got to write that on the wall. Your wise words.

Scientific credentials doesn't stop someone from being fooled. Read up on Project Alpha [wikipedia.org] where two mentalists were able (with the assistance of Randi) to con a paranormal research group into thinking they had genuine psychic powers. The con was simply to kick up a fuss until the protocols went their way and bend things when people weren't looking. The scientists were even ready to announce their results to the world when Randi stepped in and revealed the hoax to them. Scientists are not necessarily equipped to spot frauds from occurring whereas magicians and confidence tricksters might well be. They have much to learn from each other especially when paranormal claims are being examined.

t his objectivity seems highly suspect to me. His convictions seem to get in the way of his thinking, and I am pretty sure that the money will never be awarded no matter how well the subject matter may be demonstrated.

Rubbish.

The experiments he does are always designed so that the result is obvious to anybody watching. Results are black/white, yes/no. No interpretation or judgment is needed from him.

The participants are asked at every stage if they're happy (mainly so they can't claim afterwards that they weren't...). They get trial runs, things are altered as needed so they're sure they can perform.

Randi couldn't possibly be more fair in what he does, yet the million goes unclaimed...

Oh yeah...he's super reliable. After all, he said he made accurate predictions so it must be true that he did. Why would we need independant confirmation when he said he did it. Good enough for me.

Here are some of his recent predictions from the Wiki article about him...

"McMoneagle's future predictions include the passing of a teenager's "Right to Work" Bill,[16] a new religion without the emphasis of Christianity, a science of the soul,[17] a vaccine for AIDS,[18] a movement to eliminate television,[17] and a 'temporary tattoo' craze that would replace the wearing of clothing.,[19] all of which were supposedly to take place between 2002 and 2006."

100% accuracy!!! Oh wait...i that "1" at the beginning of the number was a typo.

Psychics don't exist, water witching is garbage, magic isn't real. Accept the world as it exists, in reality, have and get on with life.